Dream Incubation
by safa'at keruth
Summary: Post-series. Mokuba's adventures in America, adolescence, and separation anxiety. Stepshipping, for contest.


The Yu-Gi-Oh! Fanfiction Contest  
Season 12, Round 1 - **Stepshipping (Mokuba x Noa)  
**_Summary: Mokuba's adventures in America, adolescence, and separation anxiety._

Warning: Vague implications of Mokuba x Seto.

* * *

**Dream Incubation**

* * *

**1. Departure**

The only thing that Seto really said before Mokuba left for college was, "You'll be fine. And if you aren't, you know how to reach me."

They had been standing in an empty section of Domino's airport, a little to the side of the doors, because not even Seto was allowed past security. The lights of the high ceiling reflected in the glass walls so that Mokuba could see slivers of the dark, deserted stretch of road outside. It was three in the morning, so there were no people outside, but if there had been, they would have looked inside to see two young men, one shorter than the other, standing face to face and not speaking. Mokuba liked talking to Seto, even if his brother rarely responded, but in serious situations he listened.

"You'll be fine" was the only thing that Seto really said. He'd said other things, of course, reminders for Mokuba to email every week and last-minute orders for the butler who would be escorting Mokuba there. But he paused for a moment, standing by the door, rested one hand on Mokuba's shoulder, and said, "You'll be fine."

He and Seto had never really needed verbal communication to understand each other. So instead of replying, Mokuba looked at his brother, memorizing his face for a year in which he would have nothing but memory to connect himself to Japan.

He hadn't thought he needed the comfort of Seto's words and the hand on his shoulder. In the quiet of the waiting area, there hadn't been anything in his mind except a quick tally of things he needed to remember (passport, ticket, breakfast) and the beginnings of nostalgia for his life in Domino. But in college, on days when he had two essays and a group project to do, or when he missed Japanese food so much it was like an ache in his stomach, _you'll be fine_ was what kept him going.

* * *

**2. Dreaming I**

Mokuba started having strange dreams a little after Battle City ended. The dreams usually involved a landscape and an objective. They also usually involved Noa.

Tonight there was a ring of Kuribohs dancing in a circle in the grass while Mokuba tried to climb the highest tree in the forest. He was pretty sure that he'd had a dream along these lines before, but he was too invested in getting a better grip on the trunk to ponder for much longer. One of the Kuribohs had climbed onto his back and was busy making purring noises into his shirt. As it purred, it tugged on his collar until he fell off the tree and onto the forest floor, where he lay and wondered where Noa was.

He saw Noa at the top of the tree. His face peered down through a gap in the leaves, half covered by foliage. It was the same color as his hair. "Hello," Noa said, but the tree was so high that his voice came out faded and scratchy.

Mokuba opened his mouth to reply. Sometimes talking worked, and sometimes it didn't. "Do I dream about you when I'm stressed?"

"Maybe," Noa said. "Are you stressed?"

"I could be. I have, uh… lots of homework."

"That sounds stressful." It was hard to hear sarcasm from a whole tree away, but that was probably it.

* * *

**3. Drinking**

Mokuba got drunk for the first time when he was nineteen, at a party he attended with his hallmates. He would normally have felt a little guilty about breaking the law, but nineteen was almost the legal drinking age in Japan anyway, so it was okay. At least, that was what he reasoned to himself once an hour had passed.

Being drunk made him content to sit on the arm of the sofa and watch other people in the room. There was the junior two floors down flirting with someone in his economics class, one of his statistics classmates flirting with the senior who worked at the computer center, a girl spilling a cup of punch, a really attractive girl with short hair by the table—oh, it was a guy—well, he was still really attractive anyway—

"Wait a second," Mokuba said out loud.

Nobody responded. He looked a little closer—dark jeans, hair to his ears, bangs all across his forehead. Definitely male, but still attractive.

"Crap," Mokuba said.

* * *

**4. A Conversation that Never Happened**

"Hey, big brother?"

"Yes?"

"I might like men a little."

"Okay."

"I saw this guy yesterday and I thought he was attractive."

"Okay."

"...he might have looked a little like you."

"...Okay."

* * *

**5. A Conversation that Might Have Happened**

Mokuba was on a glacier, and he was trying to reach a short gray tower by the edge where the ice dropped off into water. There was also a snowstorm. "Why can't I ever talk to you normally in these dreams?" he said.

Noa was wearing an orange parka and black sweatpants, which made him look a lot more like a teenager than his white suit did. He was also Mokuba's height, even though Mokuba had gotten a lot taller since Battle City. Noa's mouth moved, but the wind swallowed whatever he had to say. The only part Mokuba heard was "your problem."

When Mokuba looked at the tower again, a man appeared in the window, waving. "See?" He pointed. "That's the guy from the party."

"He's not that attractive," Noa said haughtily. The snowstorm had quieted enough around them that they could hear each other now.

"I know," Mokuba moaned.

"I think I'm more attractive," Noa said.

Mokuba squinted at him through the flying snow. The wind pushed him to the left before he could get a good look. "You kind of look like him, actually."

"I'm offended," Noa said.

* * *

**6. Dreaming II**

Sometimes Mokuba dreamed about Gozaburo's mansion, the house he had wandered so often when Seto was locked in his room or the library, lost in a world of books and papers. In his dreams, the house was always bigger than it actually was, and the corridors were longer and full of shadowy things that Mokuba stumbled over as he walked.

It was only after he'd met Noa in the virtual world that Mokuba began to put together some of the odd things he'd seen on his wanderings. There was a storage room with cardboard boxes filled with toys, and another room with wooden train tracks still glued to the floor. As a child, Mokuba had dismissed the toys and the train tracks as eerie phenomena of a house he didn't like very much, but later he realized that they were remnants of Noa's existence that the staff had done a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up.

In his dreams, sometimes he opened door after door and found the rooms piled higher and higher with boxes and children's books, until he retreated to the first, emptiest room. There, he pulled stuffed animals and puzzles out of the boxes until either Noa showed up or the dream ended. Strangely enough, he rarely dreamed about finding Seto.

* * *

**7. Deliberating**

In the week following his first encounter with alcohol, Mokuba compiled a mental list of attractive men he saw on campus. He also compiled a subset of the first list that included the ones who looked like Noa (or Seto. He wasn't entirely sure which resemblance he was looking for), and found that the two lists more or less overlapped. To distract himself from the results, he did his next four statistics homeworks in one day and participated in a long and involved common room debate about the common curriculum.

At the end of the week, it was Saturday afternoon, and Mokuba was sitting on the steps of the library with his laptop out, supposedly finishing an essay. In reality, he was thinking more about Seto than he had for a long time.

When he'd told Seto about his dreams about Noa, after a particularly strange one involving a water park and lots of seals, Seto had said that it was probably stress-induced. And he had been more or less correct—once Mokuba stopped staying up late to help him debug the new Duel Disk software, the dreams had quickly decreased in frequency.

He was so used to worrying about Seto—subtly, quietly, because Seto insisted on taking care of himself—that it surprised him that he hadn't considered the possibility of Seto having recurring dreams too.

What would his brother dream about? Gozaburo? Their parents? Mokuba wasn't sure. It seemed like the older he got and the more he thought he knew about Seto, the more he realized he had no idea about at all. They'd diverged paths at some point in the years they'd spent with Gozaburo, and both of them had come out as different people. There was a time—a very, very long period of time—when Mokuba had wanted more than anything to be like Seto when he grew up. But he'd grown out of that too, so gradually that he hadn't even realized it until this day on the library's steps.

Why Noa, then? Mokuba thought back to his memories of Noa's virtual world, which by now were blurry and disjointed. He remembered long journeys with Seto, a room with a dark carpet, and—oh.

Sitting on the floor with Noa's arms around his shoulders. The virtual reality hadn't been sophisticated enough to provide much sensory detail, but his clearest memory was of Noa's body, warm against his back. It was the first hug Mokuba had had in a long time.

* * *

**8. Dreaming III**

Mokuba was in the room he'd had in Gozaburo's mansion, with the curtains drawn and the blankets rumpled on the bed. The air was so still he felt like he was disturbing it with his breathing. "I'm not usually in here," he said.

Noa was on the mattress, his legs swinging in the air. The shadows made his face look sharper, around Mokuba's age. This close, the resemblance between him and the guy at the party was significantly fainter. "I know," he said.

Mokuba looked up. He was sitting on the floor, the way he used to do while he was waiting for Seto to finish his lessons, tracing the spines of the books on the bookshelf with his fingers. "Did I tell you about the guy at the…"

"You already told me."

"Does it mean that I like you?"

Noa's legs slowed in their swinging, but he didn't respond. Instead, he kept staring at Mokuba, his face expressionless. Mokuba found himself observing each of Noa's features in detail, focusing on the way they shifted when he tilted his head. Maybe it was the lighting, but Noa had a nice face. A really nice face.

"Is that a yes?" Mokuba said after an indeterminate amount of silence.

"You said you dream about me when you're stressed," Noa said. "What are you worrying about?"

Mokuba didn't say anything, but the thoughts he didn't speak hung in the air between them, like he'd put them up on clothespins to observe in the semi-darkness. Noa's eyes traveled over them, separating them out from their tangles until they were suspended as single strings from the air. There was one that said, _college_, and another that said, _that guy at the party_, and a clutter of them centered around the one that said, _Seto Kaiba_.

Mokuba reached out and picked up the ones that said _Noa_. "Why do I keep dreaming about you anyway," he said, but he already mostly knew the answer. The hug, and the what-ifs of a brother he could have had, and the knowledge, now that he was old enough to understand it, of what Gozaburo had done to all of them.

"I must be important," Noa said dryly.

Mokuba stood up, and then he was standing in front of the bed, so close that the only thing he could see was Noa and the lines the shadows cast onto his face. Noa raised his eyebrows, expectant, when Mokuba hesitated. "You'll be okay," he said, almost the same way Seto had. "Goodbye, Mokuba."

"Bye," Mokuba said, and this time he didn't pause before he leaned down and kissed him. Noa's skin was as warm as it had been during the hug, and Mokuba woke up smiling.

* * *

.

.

* * *

A/N: _Dream incubation_ is the technique of "learning to 'plant a seed' in the mind, in order for a specific dream topic to occur, either for recreation or to attempt to solve a problem" (from Wikipedia).

Criticism? Comments? Anecdotes? Please review! :)


End file.
